Forward: CEOs of Jewish nonprofits fare well in 2009, but women not as well as men

The Forward this morning published its second annual survey of salaries of CEOs of Jewish nonprofits and found that while the CEOs of Jewish nonprofits may not have had it all that bad last year, women who head organizations did not make out as well as their male counterparts.

The paper queried 74 organizations and found that in 2009, some 80 percent of the heads of Jewish organizations actually received raises, despite that their organizations were in the throws of the recession. Not bad, when The Chronicle of Philanthropy recently found that 59 percent of CEOs in the broader nonprofit world got raises in 2009.

Still, says the paper, women lag behind men in terms of pay:

In this, the Jewish communal experience is dramatically at odds with trends in the broader not-for-profit world. GuideStar, which collects the informational tax forms that not-for-profit groups are required to file with the Internal Revenue Service, reported in September that women were chief executives of nearly 47% of the nation’s charities in 2008. Although women were concentrated in smaller organizations, even in the larger charities — those with annual budgets of more than $1 million — they still held 38% of the top roles.

Using public records listed on GuideStar, the Forward found that the gap between male and female salaries among Jewish executives did grow smaller from 2008 to 2009, but women still earned only 67 cents to every dollar earned by men. The median salary for men was $316,074; for women it was $213,855.

Overall, Jewish not-for-profit leaders took home more pay in 2009, but here, too, there was a serious gender gap: For men, the median salary increase was 5.82%; for women it was 1.42%. Only six leaders in our survey took no pay increase at all, and three of them were women.